


For Science

by HostisHumaniGeneris



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Biotechnology, For Science!, Gen, Transformation, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 00:38:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/pseuds/HostisHumaniGeneris
Summary: A glance at an average lab technician's life in an AU where instead of only using it to create monsters, the ridiculous biotechnology of the Resident Evil franchise is used for the betterment of mankind.





	For Science

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/gifts).



Danielle walked down the street, grimacing as she approached her job.  She pulled her hood up over her head and hoped the ridiculous Jackie O sunglasses would make it hard for them to see her clearly.  The protestors were back again.

When the debates in Congress started on whether to remove the bans on human viral-based enhancement, all Hell broke loose at her lab.  Obviously, big pharma had been greasing some wheels on Capitol Hill, and the idiots were greasing wheels moving in the opposite direction.  It was held around the offices to be a victory when the ban was removed. 

And the protestors had been out in force ever since.  They’d had picketers before, every time a news outlet did one of their scare pieces about increased crop yields or something, there’d be a few picketers.  But with human testing, that seemed to bring out an alliance of everyone who could possibly take offense to making people better.

Obviously, there was a sizeable contingent of granola-crunching idiots who didn’t realize humanity had been modifying nature since the dawn of time—their ‘organic’ produce was just the latest in a millennia-long controlled breeding experiment.  The Religious right was unsurprisingly Hellfire and Brimstone—Danielle had known a few protests in bigger cities ended really awkward when adherents of several different and mutually-exclusive religions all showed up to protest Big Pharma and ended up debating each other’s conception of the divine.  Angrily.

One possible benefit was that all of these groups probably hated on another, as much, if not more than they hated Danielle.  Someone in denim and threadbare flannel was arguing with a man in a shirt and tie over who was in charge.  A handful of police officers were standing around between the mass of the protestors and the office, shifting uneasily.  Danielle doubled her pace and headed through the front doors, where Jackie was busy looking over her desk at the picket lines. 

“Mornin’, Dani.” Jackie said, craning her neck to the side to look around her.  

“How long have they been at this?” Danielle asked, turning to look at the picketers.  They were glaring at the building, but it felt they were staring at her in particular.

“I got here at seven and maybe half as many people were here, then.” Jackie said.  “One of the churches bussed in a bunch of people.  I missed the weather reports today—is it _supposed_ to rain, or are the Umbrella’s all props for this protest?”

“Props, I think… although you’d think they’d all manage to get red-and-white if they were doing it for that reason.”  Danielle said turning to look out the windows and scowling.  Although it had been cloudy on her way in—she’d missed the weather, too.  She sighed and checked her phone.  “Actually, it’s supposed to rain…”

As if on cue, a few of the picketers turned their attention skyward.  Danielle looked at the sidewalk right outside the building, watching little dark spots start to appear, and then back to the confused-looking crowd.  She laughed.

“Y’know, you aren’t going to convince anyone you’re not a mad scientist if you gaze at those poor deluded fools outside your lab and laugh maniacally.” Jackie said, taking a sip of her coffee.  Danielle smiled back and shrugged.  “By the way, the whole ‘unabomber chic’ look you have is very inconspicuous”.

Jackie’s tone was completely flat, which meant she was being completely sarcastic.

“Yeah, yeah.” Danielle muttered, turning away from the crowd who were starting to form tight circles around the umbrella-bearers.  “But the point isn’t to make me unnoticeable, just… y’know.”

Jackie knew.  Danielle sometimes wondered if the cracks about her fashion were just faux pas on Jackie’s part, or if she was trying to act like Danielle was completely normal.  It was hard to get a read on the woman; hard to get a read on a lot of people not willing to stare you eye-to-eye.

Whatever.

She walked through reception and down the hall, past Sam, the security guard.  With his tiny frame and white mustache, he honestly looked more like a Wal-Mart greeter than anyone who’d be capable of handling the picketers, which was why Danielle was grateful that there had been an actual police presence.  Still, Sam was always nice to her in a way that seemed genuine.  “Mornin’ Danielle”

“Sam” She nodded. 

“Think maybe at five I should pull your car right up front?” Sam asked.  “I’m not sure it’s safe for any of us…”

Danielle looked at him and nodded.  Valet service probably would be a good idea here.  “Sounds like a plan, although you know me…”

“Won’t be leaving at five?” Sam asked, taking a sip of coffee.  “Well, just let me know.”

She nodded and swiped her ID and went through the door after the lock disengaged.  It was nice of Sam to offer to bring her car in, but it was frustrating it was necessary.  First, Drexler wasn’t doing any experimentation on humans.  Second, what they were doing was no different from regular genetic modification of plants, except the Progenitor Virus opened up more options than previously thought of before.

If she was in a better mood, Daniellee would have admitted that to be entirely fair, the roots of the biotechnology spun out of a biowarfare project from Umbrella; for whatever the fucking reason, had been trying to figure out to use their viruses to make weapons of mass destruction—not by simply making lethal pathogens, but by using it to mutate all sorts of animals and plants.  That was wholly wrong, and more people should have done jail time for the things that they did.

But everything Drexler Biological Labs was doing was to enhance crop yields.  The work they did could make plants bigger, more resistant to pests.  There were countless hoops to jump through, regulatory and non, but the effects were ridiculous.  Umbrella, in it’s ‘lets make a virus that turns people into unstoppable monsters that kill people, rather than just have the virus kill people’ phase, managed to grow arthropods several thousand times their normal size.  They turned a single potted plant into something that took over a building.  Breaking the sharp edges off of technology like that could do more to save the world than anything the picketers were planning.

You simply had to be careful, because working on the baseline viruses could yield dangerous results.  However, while Umbrella struggled for years to make things faster, stronger, and smarter, Drexler and other companies like it had the comparatively easy task of making things dumber and docile.  Mutating a Maize plant to just grow big was a lot simpler once you were aware of the viral mechanisms that made Maize grow big and carnivorous—it was a little tricky but manageable.

That said, virally-enhanced transgenic crops still had yet to reach FDA approval yet.  It was inordinately frustrating, because they had several generations of lab rats raised on the stuff, and when properly prepared, they grew up as health as the control rats.  Healthier, even, although you had to be very careful about results like that.  Another lab’s chief scientist told a reporter something similar; how the rats fed modified corn suffered an almost statistically insignificant decrease in the incidence of certain cancers.  Cue the news reports about the company breeding mutant super rats.

Danielle got to her workstation and tossed her coat on the back of her chair, sitting down to log in; long, scaly fingers dancing across the keyboard.  She removed her sunglasses, and the vertical slits of her pupils contracted without something between the and a source of light.  The jet-black ocelli, about the width of her thumbnail dotted her face, two each right under her regular eyes.  She pulled away from the computer as it loaded itself, unlacing and kicking off her boots.  It had took her a long time to learn how to “walk normal” on her digitigrade feet, and it was not normal for her anymore.  It was annoying.

It was an accident in the lab back in New York, which was why she had been transferred to the one here.  Lab accidents happened, and she admitted she had been careless.  The company was good enough to not fire her outright—although that probably had something to do with publicity concerns, instead n sticking her someplace out of the way, asking her to stay incognito, and increasing her rate of pay.

The changes had been… it had been an adjustment.  Handling the added input from her ocelli was a little tricky.  She had to abandon vegetarianism as her hunger for meat increased.  The company, and the federal investigation were ridiculous and thorough, and she imagined her blood samples were probably in labs up and down the U.S.  But as she adjusted, it provided a… unique point of view. 

The strain they were using was supposed to have minimal effects, and it was true, more or less.  Sensory changes were present, but in large part the strangest thing was how she did not feel strange about the changes.  She was largely herself.  The changes could’ve been a lot worse, honestly, she’d been led to believe they _should have_ been worse.  There were plenty of changes, but it was still based on the Progenitor virus.  So the fact she was sharp as ever was surprising and reassuring.

That new perspective made up for the shock of the changes.

There was always a little bit of lingering doubt that what they were doing was not safe—that something bad could happen.  She was always worried—the strains they were using never were tested on animals, and the allegedly limited side effects were theoretical.  The first few days after her infection were terrifying and sickening.  But given how things had progressed with her, her fears were more or less allayed. 

She got used to seeing something scaly and lumpy in the mirror through six eyes very quickly.  She wasn’t quite human anymore, but she still argued about sci-fi on the internet, still could do work.  The primary difficulty wasn’t dealing with herself, it was dealing with other people.  She hated to admit, that was pretty easy, too.  She hadn’t attended a family thanksgiving, Christmas, or anything else in years before her infection.  She was unattached and hadn’t been looking at the time.  Maybe if she was more of a social person, her condition would be more problematic.

She browsed the local news.  An article on the protests outside robbed her of her made her grimace.  It was a picture, what looked like one of those creepy culty churchy families; the kind where every man from the dad to the grade schooler wears a white shirt, dark slacks, and a tie; and all the women are in dresses, no exception.  The sign the little children of the damned were holding up caught her eye.  “VIRUS + PEOPLE = SOULLESS MONSTERS”?  That was just hurtful.  She couldn’t force herself to look at the comments.

But times they were a-changing.

There was a genetically-modded pet show going on in New York—they were status symbols of the idle rich.  Most of them had some kind of -saur suffix, and were allegedly based off of Umbrella’s hunters.  Except they were maybe the size of a housecat and were engineered for docility, rather than aggression.  Maybe the Hunter connection was just marketing hype.  All the colors of the rainbow, too.  Everyone wanted their own tiny dinosaur that begrudgingly accepted cuddles without tearing your face off, but few could afford it. 

Sometimes she considered saving up for one—the price tag was ridiculous—but maybe they’d be more amenable as pets than cats and dogs.  They weren’t particularly fond of her anymore.

Give it a few years, and the SPCA would probably be full of mutt-o-saurs sooner or later.  Flocks of feral-o-saurs would probably be a problem, too.  And obviously that would be genetic engineering’s fault; not the pet owners.  After all, it’s not like feral cats, feral pigs, and feral bunny rabbits were problems in places not accustomed to dealing with them.  It annoyed her, but the little neosaur colored like a red-eyed tree frog brightened her day, look at the little guy go.

She smiled at the latest reports of Senator Dawes, staunch anti-genetic engineering advocate, who had recently been caught paying a clinic under the table for alleged viral therapies for his DJD and ED—with transcripts of him describing his problems over a wiretapped phone.  It was probably a snake oil salesman rather than an actual scientist, but that still brightened her day.  The press was having a field day about it, and nothing undercut the people decrying her as a soulless monster than the fact they’d become the same.

Here she was, at work, slacking off and reading the news.  What could be more human?

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, even if you're trying to use horrible mutating viruses for the betterment of all mankind, honestly I figure things would still escape containment--it wouldn't be an Resident Evil story (even an AU one) otherwise. Except instead of going on a rampage... you'd get really big corn plants and meeping tiny hunters.


End file.
